We already painted the lower kitchen cabinets and replaced the countertops back in 2016, but the upper cabinets and the wall/ceiling remained. Needless to say this would put the kitchen out of commission, but we also didn’t want Axel running around while doing the stripping work. We were fortunate enough to be able to stay in a friend’s Ohana for a month in September while we did the work.

The kitchen took a lot longer than I had planned. It’s amazing how much longer any form of corners, trim, etc, take over just a plain surface. Our ballpark rate for stripping a wall is 1m^2/hour. However, when you have to do rounded trim, or inside cabinets where you can’t fit the Speedheater very well, it takes many times longer than that. The kitchen had an abundance of such problems. Stripping and sanding the ceiling is also very hard on the neck, even if the weight of the Speedheater is carried by the stand. My generally unhappy neck just does not like looking upwards for hours on end.

This is what we had to work with. The lower cabinets there are done, but everything else needs stripping and painting.

Kathy plugs away at stripping the ceiling with the Speedheater.

This is the easy part of the stripping work. The flat walls go quickly.

The cabinets are not easy to strip, though. It’s very cramped, but the new Cobra from Speedheater made it a lot easier.

It turned out to be very difficult to get the large Speedheater into the shelved cabinets, so we decided to invest in the new “Cobra” from Speedheater. It’s a much smaller IR heater that’s perfect for doing detail work. It made it possible to get the paint out of the corners, but it was still slow work.

Lots of repair work

Priming in progress

Top coat on ceiling

Done

The final result

In the end it took 7 weeks from start to finish, so that’s how long we didn’t have a kitchen. Out of that, the stripping was just over a month, the rest painting. There’s always a long tail of painting, with a few coats of Brushing Putty on surfaces receiving the brilliant white paint, each requiring drying at least 48h until it’s easily sandable without clogging up the paper.

We’ve been  wondering how to finish the kitchen since we started it in 2016, so it feels good to be done (except the cabinet doors, of course.) The remaining large job is the living room. We’re still working out how to manage that…